Group work and its organization

Acquisition of communicative competence presupposes interactive organization of teaching. Many scientists agree that interaction can be practically achieved through group work, which is the most effective way to maintain cooperation and communication. Group is not a random assemblage of independent idividuals, say T. Gamble and M. Gamble, but is composed of individuals who interact verbally and nonverbally, who occupy certain roles with respect to one another, and who cooperate to accomplish a definite goal.

Different researchers in the field agree that group work is very important for organization of an interactive lesson and acquisition of communicative competence giving students greater opportunities to speak; developing their collaborative skills; giving students a feeling of security. Such mode of interaction promotes learner responsibility and autonomy, and contributes to individualized instruction.

The cooperative classroom where group work is actively used promotes social skills training, such as making sure everyone has a turn to speak, giving encouragement, being polite to other students, and listening when other group members are saying. Teacher should help students develop the abilities for social interaction, which are needed for effective collaboration. The abilities to coordinate work, make decisions, communicate and solve different problems are indispensable for long-standing group cooperation.

One more important advantage offered by group work is the security of a smaller group. As it is stated by psychologists, the main need of a human being is the need to feel safety. One of the most important ways of gaining safety is to join other people, to be part of a group, where each individual is not so starkly on public display. In small groups reticent students quite often become vocal participants in the process. The small group becomes a community of learners cooperating with each other in pursuit of common goals.

Working in small groups (2-4 people) places responsibility for action and progress of the whole group upon each of its members. It is difficult to "hide" in a small group. P. Johnson and M. Johnson speak about the principle of individual accountability and explain that it is in effect when each child knows that he /she may bear full responsibility for the information or the skills being learned by the group. There are no hitchhikers — only full participants. So group work promotes learner responsibility and autonomy.

One more positive side of group work is that it is a step toward individualized instruction, opportunity for teacher to take into account every student’s needs and abilities that are unique. Teacher can recognize and capitalize upon some individual differences (age, cultural heritage, field of study, cognitive style, etc) by careful selection of small groups and by administering different tasks to different groups.

Ukrainian scholars O. Pometun and L. Pyrozhenko, Americans P. Johnson and M. Johnson and British scholar Roger Gower also highlight such advantages of group work as positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction and group processing.

Positive interdependence means that the efforts of every member of the group are useful and indispensable for the success of the whole group; every member brings a unique contribution into the work of the group due to either their abilities, knowledge, experience or their role in the group. Face-to-face interaction is personal cooperation that stimulates education and development of speech skills. Group processing is just as important to the classroom routine as are quizzes and other strategies for determining progress in the subject content. Teacher helps learners analyze what is working well in their group and what can be improved, offers suggestions when individual groups are having specific problems. Much of the group processing can take place in the target language, providing an additional area for meaningful communication within the classroom.

However, some teachers neglect group work, because they feel they will lose control and students will use L1 instead of practising the target language, their errors will be reinforced in small groups as teachers fail to monitor all groups at once. Furthermore, some learners prefer to work alone or problems may occur when students hardly know one another.

But the fears seem unreasonable if teachers are prepared for managing the class in a proper way. Group work needs strategic organization, planning and qualified monitoring students’ work, which requires a lot of attention and responsibility from teacher. Lack of organisation can cause serious problems in interactive classrooms.

One more challenge that leads to poor and unsuccessful group work is dominance of some group members over others on the one hand and diffusion of responsibility of some participants on the other. This is where teacher has to motivate students who are reluctant to participate and encourage the shared responsibility. If group work is overexploited, used indiscriminately or too frequently, it may lose its effectiveness. Thus, teachers should use this type of work appropriately and according to the situation.

Groups can be organised on homogeneous or heterogeneous basis depending on teacher’s objectives. An important issue to consider is the number of people in group. All groups are classified as those having even and odd number of people. Y. Polat says that groups of two people can share information and have low chances of disagreements. Groups of three people are the most stable ones but there is a risk of two people dominating over the third person. Groups offour-five are also the most stable ones. Such groups are big enough to stimulate work and to exclude dominance of some members over others. The group of more than six people seems ineffective because of limited contribution of every student into the group work.

In conclusion, group work as a type of classroom organisation is effective if students are motivated in obtaining certain knowledge or experience in a particular situation, when they have enough language practice and may evaluate the completed work and the contribution of everybody into the success or failure of the group.

Дата добавления: 2017-01-13